When senior executives at Deutsche Bank describe a blueprint for the bank's future, they hark back to the 2012 sale of a Hawaiian island by US billionaire David Murdock.

Deutsche Bank's Frankfurt office

The German bank brokered the sale of Lanai island to Oracle Corp. Chief executive Larry Ellison, who is a client of the bank's wealth management and investment banking units.

Since then, Deutsche Bank co-CEO Anshu Jain has made it a top priority to get its investment bank and wealth management business to work to each other's benefit.

"We're building a global wealth management with a stronger presence in the US and Asia. That is one of our top priorities," Jain said in an interview. He added that the long-term earnings potential of the bank's asset and wealth-management unit is underestimated by investors.

On Tuesday, the bank will report its second-quarter results, and investors will be on the lookout for signs it has made progress.

Analysts are sceptical. "In our view, revenues like at other wealth managers are at cyclical lows due to the low interest rate environment, uncertain macro leading to limited client risk appetite," JP Morgan analysts said in a recent note.

Even if the wealth management business manages to exceed expectations, it isn't likely to shift focus away from Deutsche Bank's long list of other problems. Like its peers, the bank is struggling from market conditions that have depressed trading revenue. Analysts say it is likely to be forced to sock away hundreds of millions of additional dollars to cover expected legal and regulatory settlements.

And public attention will be concentrated in large part on Deutsche Bank's strained relationship with US regulators, after The Wall Street Journal last week reported on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's frustration with how the bank's US arms are reporting financial data to regulators.

Related

The wealth-management strategy of Jain and co-CEO Jürgen Fitschen marked a shift from the bank's strategy under a previous regime, which had kept the different business lines separate and largely unconnected to investment banking.

People familiar with the matter said Jain had been frustrated when he took over the reins to learn that while his investment bankers advised large companies including Oracle, Japan's SoftBank or Twitter on deals worth billions of dollars, the wealth management team often didn't have contact with these companies' leaders.

The bank created a corporate finance partnership team that combs through the investment bank's deal list and selectively offers it to wealth managers. The team increased revenue by over 160% last year to more than €100 million ($134 million), a person familiar with the matter said.

Another team that manages 100 key clients offers sophisticated capital market investments to the ultrarich, such as oil swaps. It has boosted revenue by nearly 50% in the year to date to almost €100 million, the person said.

Jain, a longtime investment banker, is also pitching in directly, often joining the bank's top wealth management advisers for meetings with wealthy individuals, according to people familiar with those meetings. Deutsche Bank also made a number of hires in asset and wealth management in the Americas earlier this month from JP Morgan Chase & Co. and others.

The idea of tapping a vast network of corporate executives and investment banking contacts for wealth management services isn't new or unique to Deutsche Bank. The business lines are intertwined at several other major global banks. Deutsche Bank executives also privately acknowledge that its rivals are further ahead in capturing this type of collaboration revenue synergy.

But the German bank's executives say the moves are paying off, contributing to record recent inflows of client money into the wealth management unit, which, they say, is now on track to hit a target of €1.7 billion in pretax profit next year.

Investors have said they would also look at how Deutsche Bank's large fixed income sales and trading business performed after some US banks surprised positively.

Still, better cooperation between the investment bank and wealth management business, if sustainable, could win over sceptical analysts and investors. "It is possible to reap [cross selling revenues]. But they need to be tangible enough to be a credible value driver for Deutsche Bank," said Dirk Becker, an analyst at Kepler Capital Markets.